Sermon for Epiphany 4B, February 1, 2015

Text: Mark 1:21-28

            Beloved in Christ, our Lord’s preaching muzzles the unclean spirits. We see that happening clearly in today’s text, and so I’d like to explore each aspect of that sentence: Our Lord’s preaching muzzles the unclean spirits.

            We begin with our Lord’s preaching. Our whole text today is about our Lord’s preaching. There was nothing like it, before or afterwards. When He taught in the synagogue at Capernaum, people recognized that “He taught them as one who had authority.” Of course, as we will see, part of His authoritative teaching involved His casting out unclean spirits. That is what led the people to say that He was “teaching with authority!” But there was something else remarkable about the way that He taught. He did not teach “as the scribes.” He was rather unique in His preaching, and the people recognized it and called it “a new teaching with authority.”

            That phrase gets at the heart of the matter. It is easy enough to teach something new, but it is difficult to do it with authority. That is true even in today’s society where we have a penchant for the new. Now we may change ideas and even life philosophies as often as we change underwear. This week we love what this one self-help guru is saying; next week we’ll be listening to some doctor with his healthy life hints. But in spite of our fascination with the new—or, more likely, because of it—we really are wary that there could be anything authoritative. If I know that the fad I’m currently enamored with replaced the fad I was into a couple of weeks ago, then how certain can I really be that this is the end-all and be-all of existence? We constantly upgrade and replace technology. We expect our newest gadgets to be obsolete in a few months or a couple of years. So how can there be something authoritative in an ever changing world?

            The problem that faced the people in our Lord’s day was the flipside. They weren’t the sort of people to adopt the newest thing; their motto was to stick with the tried and true. In many ways that philosophy served them well. God Himself had told them through the prophet Malachi, “Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.” That is one of the last verses ever written in the Old Testament. God was promising to send someone new, but in the meantime they were to stick close to what God had already given them. Indeed, for most of Israel’s history the problems had arisen when they had tried to innovate by bringing in idols and other spiritual practices that they found in the nations around them.

            Consequently, the rabbis were very careful in those days. They did not want to say anything that had not been said dozens of times by other rabbis. And so when they would preach on a particular passage of the Old Testament, they would say such things as, “I heard Rabbi Levi tell me that he had heard a conversation between Rabbi Simeon and Rabbi Reuben, where they said such-and-such.” These rabbis were not innovating, but neither were they authorities themselves. Instead they cited others who might be.

            What was needed was “a new teaching with authority.” You’ve heard me mention more than once that there are two Greek words for new: one that means “never existed before” and another that means “new and improved.” It is the latter that is used here. Our Lord wasn’t teaching something completely unheard of. He was not contradicting what Moses and the prophets had said, as heretics are accustomed to do. No, He was deepening what has been said, but He was building on them. Think, for example, of how our Lord explained the Ten Commandments. He took such phrases as “You shall not murder” and explained how it forbids anger, name-calling, and the like. Or think of how He insisted that the Old Testament wasn’t just a collection of old stories, but was a book that pointed to Him and His ministry.

            This is what Christ still does today. Yes, He does not walk physically into our churches and ascend into the pulpit. But His teaching is the basis of all faithful Christian preaching. This isn’t like a rabbi quoting another rabbi or scribe, all of whom are speculating on what God might be saying. No, Jesus Christ came as God in human flesh, to reveal to us all that is necessary for us to know for our salvation and to reveal it in the clearest manner possible. Faithful Christian preaching, therefore, is about taking Christ’s words seriously and seeing in them the “new teaching with authority,” the teaching that is as old as creation but is fresh and powerful, for God has revealed it not on a mountain obscured by smoke or in the hazy dream of a mystic, but by taking on our flesh.

            And so Christ came to deal with mankind’s problems in an authoritative way. But now we have to consider another aspect of our text, the unclean spirits. Now that we’ve talked about Christ’s preaching, we have to consider the opposition that Christ faces: the unclean spirits. They go by other names such as “demons” and “evil spirits.” Chief of them is Satan or the devil. But Christ preached because He wanted to smash Satan’s power. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil,” wrote the apostle John. And today’s gospel reminds us of that truth.

            Several decades ago most people—even Christians—would have smirked when they heard such passages of the Bible or read today’s gospel. “Why,” they would say, “we are such civilized people that we don’t believe in all that mumbo-jumbo about a voodoo world!” But, of course, we have gone through such horrible decades of world war and concentration camps and gulags and genocide. And so now it makes a whole lot more sense to talk about supernatural forces of evil that goad on human beings to do an abundance of wickedness. No, we will not say that every person who committed some horrific evil was demon-possessed. But at the very least Satan and his minions are always stirring the pot. And humanity is naturally beholden to them.

            That is why even today where the gospel advances into new lands, demons are cast out and conquered. (If you want to hear more, you can read the book I am Not Afraid about how the Malagasy Lutheran Church has grown mightily in Madagascar precisely by taking seriously the need to defeat demonic forces; a copy is in the narthex.) Satan does not want centuries of idolatry to come to an end and fights overtime wherever God’s kingdom is advancing. And I dare say that as we live in an increasingly post-Christian country, we should recognize more and more the hand of Satan at work—and the need for him to be defeated and driven away. If we are slow to understand Satan’s influence today, we should take to heart what Helmut Thielecke said in the last century: “Evil cannot be seen by the evil just as stupidity cannot be perceived by the stupid.”

            Notice what we find out about the unclean spirit in today’s gospel. First, he is called “an unclean spirit.” He could have been called an “evil spirit” or some other term, but what Mark is emphasizing here is how Satan defiles people, making them unclean before God and others. This unclean spirit had no problem with the man attending the synagogue and hearing an interesting lecture on what rabbis of old had thought about this or that passage. But Jesus cut to the chase and proclaimed that He had come to redeem God’s people. Now all of a sudden the evil spirit had a problem. Unclean spirits have no problem with people being “spiritual,” for they know that they can twist whatever is spiritual out there for their purposes. But they do have a problem with Jesus, for they recognize Him as “the Holy One of God” and therefore the one who has “come to destroy” them.

            So how does Jesus deal with them? He muzzles them. Our translation says that Jesus told them to “be silent,” but “put a muzzle on it” would be more accurate, since the verb literally means “be muzzled.” In colloquial English we might say, “shut up” or “zip it.” It’s not the polite way to tell someone to be quiet. The devil loves to talk and talk and talk. You can answer him point by point, but he’ll come up with a hundred more senseless reasons for his foolish temptations. He’ll say enough of the truth—and certainly the unclean spirit in today’s gospel confessed the truth about Jesus—but he’ll still twist it for his purposes. You don’t outtalk or argue with the devil. You tell him to shut up. And he has to shut up because Jesus Christ died on the cross and smashed the devil’s kingdom by rising from the dead.

            Would that we would take this to heart! Let Jesus say, “Enough! Be silent!” Satan and all the forces of evil would like to talk you into believing that whatever feels good is right and that you need to change God’s law to conform to the times. Let Jesus say, “Shut up and scram!” The forces of darkness would love to terrify you and get you to think that you are haunted by ghosts and other forces you cannot control. Let Jesus say to those forces of darkness, “Zip it! Leave My people alone!” Satan would love to convince you that you are beyond redemption because of your sins. Let Jesus tell him, “Stuff it! Git outa here!” Because Christ has come, the devil and his minions have no right to say anything more against you, a beloved child of God. In short, Christ has come to make the devil literally shut the hell up. I don’t mean that as a vulgarity. No. The devil is spewing forth garbage from the depths of hell out of his mouth. He needs to be quieted. And he can be quieted, for Christ is the one who has conquered him.

            That is why we gather today and every Sunday. We say the words of Jesus, and it is Jesus who smashes the kingdom of the devil and muzzles the unclean spirits. May you live in that victory! In Jesus’ name. Amen.